heart eyes heart tits
love poem for the boy who
let me eat him.
love poem for the boy who let me pour honey on his hair and
comb it out, let me peel the candy wax off his lips
while we were kissing.
love poem for the boy who put my picture in his locker, who said he didn’t mind
if he bled. hello, boy,
i love u. hello boy, i can still feel u
all over my body like icing.
u had me in ur small bed like a
birdhouse, had me like a bird watcher has
the time he saw the babyblue owlet in
california, had me like a small fruit
sweet with the vry start of spring.
this is a love poem for you: boy who
loved me full of moons and heart emojis.
a blessing: may u always
glow like the light-up jewels in princess wands, sing like flowers bursting their way
out of the warm clouded garden, love
like every day is the 1st day of something
u’ve been waiting
a long long time for.
making me wait
in the hot tub, for a text back, in the time between
the forest behind your house and the invention of
facebook. my fingers have always been so
pricked and pulled over that i didn’t know what a hangnail was
until i was sixteen. for me they were a constant. same goes for childhood,
imagination, alcoholism, and anxiety.
like you’re in the woods, somewhere, and you can tell
that there’s something important very close by, by the way
everything’s glowing. you have to move slowly. you have to
pretend you’re not at all interested in reaching it: work inwards
in a spiral. write nonsense to distract the glowing thing
that lives in your fingertips, or just under
your skin. swimming in your body like you’re an aquarium.
boys call me electric, boys call me cruel. for a long time before i knew
i was suicidal i thought i just understood. same goes for girls.
same goes for love.
the dolphin on my laptop is named partricia. the tattoo
on my shoulder is named marigold. my baby
will be named june. my lover’s name is maclean, and he is made of
marigolds, too. this is not a coincidence.
maybe this is about writing: how, sometimes, poems come
fast and hard like touching yourself on a summer night full of violet.
and how sometimes they roll in front of you like the
yarn in the minotaur’s home, twisting so that you can’t see
what kind of monster you’re intruding upon. they start somewhere
and end up somewhere else. like airplanes, like
relationships. dear abby, what do i do when i
can’t find myself in my own body? dear abby i’m out of wifi, pills, and
food, and how can i make someone love me?
outside, the weather is talking to me, teaching me a language
that is a whole book of poems. they live inside my body,
inside the aquarium, with the fish. i don’t care about my jobs,
i don’t care about school, i don’t care about
the things adults talk about when they’re catching up and i’m
sitting there, tearing at my nails. i mean, i’m glad you’re back.
i mean, the fish in my aquarium body flit around
and around like the moon, like a whole solar system, their small mouths
opening and closing. i mean, this is the way
it’s always been, for me. waiting and waiting and
digging my nails into my palms.
Chloe Burns’ work has most recently appeared in baldhip magazine, text lit mag, echolocation, and The Chappess Zine.